country in the world! With one national law-making machine perpetually
at work grinding out edicts, we have some fifty provincial mills engaged
in the same interesting and, to my mind, pernicious work. No one who has
given the slightest consideration to the subject will dispute the
proposition that, taking America as a whole, we now have twenty acts of
legislation annually promulgated, and with which we are at our peril
supposed to be familiar, where one would more than suffice. Then we
wonder that respect for the law shows a sensible decrease! The better
occasion for wonder is that it survives at all. We are both legislated
and litigated out of all reason.

Passing to the other proposition of individuality, there has been, as
all men know and no one will dispute, a most perceptible tendency of
late years towards what is known as the array of one portion of the
community--the preponderating, voting portion--against another--the more
ostentatious property-holding portion. It is the natural result, I may
say the necessary as well as logical outcome, of a period of too rapid
growth,--production apportioned by no rule or system other or higher
than greed and individual aptitude for acquisition. I will put the
resulting case in the most brutal, and consequently the clearest, shape
of which I am capable. Working on the combined theories of individualism
controlled and regulated by competition, it has been one grand game of
grab,--a process in which the whole tendency of our legislation,
national or state, has during the last twenty years been, first, to
create monopolies of capital and, later, to bring into existence a
counter, but no less privileged, class, known as the "wage-earner."

Of the first class it is needless to speak, for, as a class, it is
sufficiently pilloried by the press and from the hustings. Much in
evidence, those prominent in it are known as the possessors of